The Night the Reindeer Died
by I.C. Weener
Summary: Who watches the Overwatchers?
1. Kyototaled

_"Those tin cans are no match for me."_

\- Andross, Star Fox 64

* * *

D. Va was about to learn a new meaning to the term "Zerg Rush." Muzzle flashes from fusion cannons lit up the organic walls of the alien hive as the MEKA team fought their way through an extermination mission. The squadron of female pilots blasted wave after wave of the giant slug-shaped scythe-wielding creatures with D. Va leading the charge.

The tide, however, was starting to rise against them.

Zerg poured out of the hive's chambers faster than they had ever anticipated, and the sounds of bug guts being splattered quickly changed to the sounds of bunny guts being torn out of scrap metal and ripped apart. T. Fa ran out of ammo and was taken down in seconds. B. Loni screamed on the radio as her MEKA was wrenched in half by the alien horde. A. Ha disappeared under a hundred crowdsurfing invertebrates. The Zerg were in a frenzy carving into the undercarriage of M. Jay's unit after she lost her balance and flipped over onto her canopy. The gunfire quickly died down as the human team was overwhelmed.

D. Va pushed her MEKA into full throttle and charged through the swarm with her cannons blazing. Her efforts came to an sudden end when her cockpit rattled violently and sank forward. Her UI alarms informed her the unit's right leg had suffered extensive damage and her hydraulics were toast. Even with her only means of survival trapped in one spot, she aimed her cannons upward and continued blasting through the hideous Zerg army as they swarmed her.

The cockpit rocked again as if it were being struck by an earthquake. Countless Zerg Hydralisks clustered on the roof of D. Va's MEKA and wrenched their scythes through the bright pink hull in a race to see who could pry out the human packaged inside. D. Va suddenly found herself piloting a convertible as the cockpit frame above her back peeled open with a horrible metallic screech. She could feel smoldering slug breath creeping down her neck.

Her hands were still working the controls for her cannons as the bladed arms of the meat inspectors wrapped around her and lifted her out of her cockpit. As she was separated from her machine and held up in the rancid air of the hive with the same helplessness as a naked infant, she saw the rest of her team being salvaged out of their units like her. The sight quickly turned grisly as some of the pilots were graded less valuable than others and the Zerg's need for intact organic lifeforms was overtaken by their craving for scientific knowledge and succulent carbohydrates. Spandex tore into frayed strips as flesh was severed apart. Poor R. Ri was the first one to show her guts.

D. Va was one of the pilots deemed to be of higher quality, however, and quickly she felt needles poking her skin. Zerg stingers stabbed through the back of her spandex pilot suit and injected metabolic enzymes through her body. One stinger poked into the base of her neck, one poked into the middle of her spine, and two poked into her pert gluteus muscles. The only thing that was getting Nerfed now was her immune system.

D. Va's eyes changed to the color of radioactive Mountain Dew as she yelped. She squirmed like a little blue caterpillar and screamed like she was Vincent Price at the end of The Fly as a massive eight-legged Zerg dragged her to the ceiling of the hive. The scurrying Hydralisks on the ground below harvested her trashed MEKA unit for valuable minerals.

Her senses weakened and turned delirious as the alien chemicals coursing through her body started to take effect. She groaned and struggled lazily as her alien captor rotated her in its pinchers in an orderly fashion and weaved her in layers of yellowish webbing. Once she was reduced to a tightly wound lump of Zerg barf and couldn't make a sound louder than a muffled squeak, her dripping pulsing cocoon was stuck to the hive ceiling and tucked closely together with the sacs of the other girls on the ill-fated team so they stayed warm and moist. The ones who weren't dissected alive as a science experiment and/or eaten as soon as they were extracted out of their MEKA were bundled away and left to incubate on the roof of the hive. It was kind of like a really icky version of a LAN party.

* * *

Hatching time came a few weeks later. D. Va's cocoon squirmed with life before it exploded into a waterfall of amber slime and dumped her back to the floor of the hive. The cocoons of her other squad members were bursting open like kernels of popcorn reaching their baking point. A few of the other pilots were already crawling around in the slimy puddles beside her.

D. Va's eyes weren't the only things that looked weird anymore. Her pilot suit had dissolved in the cocoon and now smooth chitin plating covered her bare frame. Her entire body had transformed into greenish-brown armored Zerg flesh molded in the shape of her human features. Her silky hair had turned into a swarm of long spongy appendages arranged like dreadlocks. The pink whisker markings on her cheeks had turned dark green and were stained to her skin like an insect's camouflage pattern.

She chuckled softly as ooze dripped off of her mouth and unsealed her lips. The only thoughts stirring in her wicked mutated mind were how to serve the hive.

Natural pheromones instructed the pilots what to do now that they had been assimilated. D. Va slinked on all fours toward the place in the alien pit where the wrecked MEKA units had been viciously dissembled. Waiting for her and her team was a line of hibernating Zerg constructs that resembled Hydralisks with empty torso cavities. The hollowed out space in each of the creatures was just the right size to accommodate a single female mate. These living chariots had been freshly grown like sea polyps and were still rooted to the thriving umbilical veins that held them to the hive floor.

D. Va crawled on her belly into the hollowed out back of one of the Zerg as if she were getting in her MEKA cockpit. The creature's naturally lubricated interior made it easy for her chitin to slide into place and sink into the cushioned membranes supporting her chest. A stray tentacle unsheathed from the roof of the cavity, slipped through a gap in the organic plating along D. Va's lower back, and bonded with the tail of her spine, making her become a single organism with the Zerg shell.

The alien husks awoke from their hibernation under the commands of their pilots. D. Va stretched her arms and sunk her bony claws into the squishy wet ligaments that formed the creature's muscle system. All of her skills as a human pilot translated seamlessly into her new mode of life. She steered using neural signals through her spine and stimulating hand movements in place of old mechanical joysticks.

The Zerg chariots snapped off their fluid-filled veins and slithered into launching formation. Together they rushed out of the hive's central ventricle leaving slime trails in their wake. D. Va's team had been culled, cocooned, and reborn with only one mission: To ensure the infestation never stopped spreading.

* * *

 _Author's note: This was inspired by that HiVa fanart Tsabo6 drew that one time._

 _Author's note 2: I wonder if all the girls in D. Va's squad are Korean. They could be like a messed up K-Pop group that sings about destroying the world and stuff._


	2. Bunny Soup

_Author's note: This is an interquel. But I redesigned the cocoon for creative reasons, so it's kind of an AU to the first chapter too._

* * *

D. Va was wondering if this was the kind of gross stuff all K-pop groups had to go through before they made it big. Glued to the ceiling of a giant alien honeycomb, packed together with the rest of her flight team like a carrot crammed in a rice box. Personal space was an impossibility in this tightly woven tent of bodies squeezing together and voices moaning in discomfort, D. Va's included. When escape from the cocoon proved hopeless, she wiggled her shoulders and shuffled her legs a little bit in an effort to at least get comfortable. It didn't do much help.

If the Zerg ran a diner, today's special would be the Hana sandwich. Her spot in the writhing mass cocoon was just underneath D. Mona, who possessed one of the more motherly body types on the team, shall we say. D. Va couldn't turn her head more than a few degrees as her face was constantly nudged into the two bulbous squishy cushions on the front of D. Mona's bright magenta pilot suit.

B. Bop was crammed underneath D. Va with the protective foam padding on her waist pressing up against D. Va's spine. Twenty or thirty others were wedged above, below, and around them in an upside-down sleeping bag that was far too small for all of them to share.

D. Va's senses were cloudy and groggy, but she could still tell when the pilot suits weren't there anymore and it was bare body parts making contact. The moisture in the cocoon webbing destroyed any synthetics trapped inside, making the all-female task force see more of each other than any MEKA locker room would permit. D. Mona's naked sweaty soggy booby things were smooshing against D. Va's face while pokey pointy nipply things were tickling her nose. D. Va objected to this with weak and only half-committed "Mmf." D. Mona gave up trying to control her top-heaviness in the squirming chaos and uttered a short helpless "Ughg." She was more concerned with whoever had their shoulder squashing her equally wide behind.

Below D. Va, B. Bop's tiny stubbly stomach hairs were prickling up around the indentation of her belly button and giving the pores on D. Va's bare back gooseflesh. Galvanized plastic and g-force-resistant spandex dissolved away, leaving the squad cooking in each other's body heat. With their minds dazed by the Zerg venom coursing through their veins, all they could do was murmur weak noises and struggle against one another in a densely packed space that smelled like bugs and girls.

Thousands of Hydralisks clung to the ceiling of the hive and covered every inch of the outside of the shared chrysalis. They were rubbing their thoraxes together like a swarm of giant ugly crickets and applying pressure to the cocoon, ensuring the precious lifeforms inside remained mashed together in a single convoluted mass of moving curves and angles. Their cricket dance prevented heat from escaping and raised the temperature of the chrysalis so the inside was constantly like a sauna, forcing along the metabolism of the MEKA team trapped within so they would undergo a healthy transformation into infested drones. The Zerg had selected only the most promising and best built lifeforms who could survive the stressful process. The mortality rate among captured pupas was highly erratic given how everything was just haphazardly thrown together and left up to nature. But in a lucky batch, almost 85% of them could make it all the way through the group metamorphosis without having their lungs crushed from constriction or their hearts explode from intense strain. The rest were simply casualties of war who were KIA in the most undignified way imaginable, even worse than those who were found unfit to enter the cocoon and quickly devoured for sustenance.

It could have taken hours, days, or weeks with D. Va's lapsing grasp of time, but gradually the pilots changed as the Zerg enzymes began to react in their bodies and their weak murmurs of discomfort changed pitch into small sighs of delight. D. Mona's front cushions lost their softness, retracted their nipply pointiness, and slowly turned into something with the texture of smooth round ceramic while still feeling warm. B. Bop's stomach tightened up and gained layered rib plating over the muscle. D. Va could feel her hair stick together in thick rubbery strands that felt like earthworms wiggling down her shoulders.

The team lost their individuality and forgot who they were in the thriving cocoon. They were killing each other by being alive. The heated chemical reactions of their human bodies were slowly turning them into Zerg, and their evolution to Zerg was destroying their humanity.

The alien instincts taking over their minds made them form a new bond that was closely knit and intensely pheromonal. Rather than names and personal backgrounds, they would know each other by body markings and genetic signals. D. Va's subconscious permanently associated D. Mona as a pair of spotted carapace humps shoved in her face. Instinct would make her always think about D. Mona's rounder qualities before anything else and drive her to aggressively defend them.

B. Bop would identify D. Va as a set of back dimples that twitched when you brushed too close against them. Q. Tea would identify B. Bop as an elbow that kept jabbing into her leg and left a swirl pattern in her thigh chitin, while Q. Tea was a knee that wouldn't stay out of Z. Bo's armpit. Their whole social caste was defined by their formative memories of being crowded together in a senseless squirming heap, each considering herself just one part of a single sum. The most efficient way to adapt a solitary species like homo sapiens into a hivemind was to ingrain them with the notion that the self was obsolete and they were siblings who shared the same physical flesh.

Time eventually came for the new battalion to hatch from their communal womb. Vapor wafted off of the wall of the cocoon from the steamed human larvae struggling and squirming inside. The thinnest section of the membrane stretched outward and tore open by a few inches, allowing a soft moan to escape from the sweltering chrysalis.

The lifeform who had called herself K. Jen prior to her organic requisitioning held her hand out from the tightly wound jumble of dark quivering and glistening body features trapped within the cocoon's webs. But instead of a pretty human hand with delicate polished nails, this hand was closer to a spindly insect limb with long segmented knuckles and dark amber claws. The fingers slowly curled together like a set of knives, and the moan rising through the opening in the cocoon descended into a soft feminine chuckle.


End file.
